Hello! I go by 'Mike Lockmoore'. I develop embedded Linux professionally (currently using Fedora 7 as my development host). I use Puppy Linux a lot at home, but I wanted to try out Tiny Core. I've frugally installed TC 1.3rc1 on my ~5 year-old Dell P4 laptop. I need wireless for this laptop to be useful, so I've managed to build the open-source driver for my TI ACX111 chipset-based Linsys W54Gv2 PCCard wireless adapter. I'm posting from this setup using Opera.
But it was not easy!
I first tried the NDISWrapper_full extension and the Windows .INF for my wireless adapter, but that did not work. I was not surprised, I could not get the NDISWrapper working very well in Puppy Linux either.
The latest versions of Puppy Linux include the acx driver module, so I thought I should be able to build and load it in TC. Here's roughly how I did it.
I loaded the following extensions:
* Wireless kernel modules (noticed the driver for acx was not included)
* Wireless_tools
* Linux headers
* GCC
* CompileTC (to get make and some other tools useful in building software)
I downloaded the acx driver source "acx-20080210.tar.bz2" from
http://acx100.sourceforge.net/ and unpacked it.
I ran the make file to build the acx.ko kernal module file.
I created a /lib/firmware folder and added it to my .filetool.lst file
I copied the acx.ko module there (I'm sure there's a more appropriate place) and also the wireless chipset firmware (FwRad16.fw in the Windows device driver installation), renamed to 'tiacx111c16' as expected by the kernel module.
With much experimentation, I came up with the following startup commands (which will be different for your access point or public access points), which I put in a script file 'wireless_start.sh':
#!/bin/sh
# commands to associate with wireless access point
sudo insmod /lib/firmware/acx.ko
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
sleep 1
sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid "{{MY ESSID}}"
sudo iwconfig wlan0 key restricted
sudo iwconfig wlan0 key "{{MY WEP KEY}}"
sleep 1
sudo udhcpc -i wlan0
sleep 1This script was placed in my /opt folder. The script has been added to my .filetool.lst.
The script is now invoked by my /opt/bootlocal.sh script. EDIT: hmmm, after reboot, my wireless_start.sh script is not automatically successful, but if I run it in a terminal, it complains that the acx module already exists, but then proceeds to associate with the access point sucessfully. Maybe I need longer sleep periods to let things stabalize?
There's probably a few things I could have done easier or better, but it seems to be working well so far, and I can surf wirelessly in TC like I wanted! Maybe my compiled acx.ko can be added to the wireless extensions?
--
Mike Lockmore
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